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art director

You’re stuck and not making any progress. You try, but you don’t move forward. You’re a car with its engine revving and the handbrake on.

It’s so frustrating.

In Ad Land, I knew the feeling well. I desperately wanted to achieve the industry’s idea of success: winning a major award, but unfortunately, I never made much progress.

I came close only once, making one of the finalist categories in The One Show, a major award in the US, but I never actually mounted the stage to collect the heavy trophy to the applause of my peers, which I had daydreamed about many times.

And it burned me up.

When I wasn’t daydreaming, I was doing OK in my job as a copywriter, and, later on, as a creative director. I worked with some great people; I helped make some very nice ads; and I got to travel the world. In many ways, things were going well.

Even so, I wasn’t satisfied. If only I could win a big award, I thought, things would be much better. There would be more travel, lucrative job offers, my name in a glossy annual of winners, and I would rise to an exulted level of people who had ‘made it.’

I continued to burn inside.

But there was a simple reason I wasn’t winning these awards: I wasn’t taking enough action to win them. I had ideas that I thought could win. I worked with other people who had great ideas too. I had even talked about presenting the ideas to our clients. But I didn’t actually take the crucial next steps required. They were too much work on top of all the work I was doing already–or so I told myself.

So, nothing happened. It still burns me.

Do you know the feeling?

This sense of frustration is the subject of ‘The Laika Project,’ one of the tales from ADLANDIA. In the story, Kelvin is a talented but junior art director who daydreams of winning a major award. He’s full of ideas, many of which he thinks are pretty good, but he never actually takes the steps required to get them made into ads. So his career, like his ideas, never really get off the ground.

Then, one morning, on his way to work, Kelvin thinks of an idea that really inspires him. He calls it, The Laika Project.

The Laika Project has enormous potential. It’s a campaign to bring back the body of Laika, the dog shot into space by the Russian space agency in 1957. Kelvin believes that with The Laika Project, he at last has the campaign that will turn everything around. He’s so fired up, that, for the first time, he begins to take the difficult steps required to bring the project to life.

But will he succeed? Will he go from zero to hero? It would be nice to think so, but the only way to find out is to click below to get your copy of ADLANDIA.